Probiotics: This decade's oat bran?

January 22, 2007|By Andrew Martin, the New York Times

NEW YORK -- The fastest way to consumers' hearts may be through their troubled stomachs.

In the year since the Dannon Co. introduced Activia, a line of yogurt with special live bacteria that is marketed as aiding regularity, sales in U.S. stores have soared well past the $100 million mark, a milestone that only a small percentage of new foods reaches each year.

Now other food makers are scrambling to offer their own products with special live microbes that offer health benefits, known as probiotics.

Probiotic foods have been popular in Europe and Asia for decades; in fact, Activia has been sold overseas since 1987. But there are challenges in replicating that success in the U.S., including an American public that eats far less yogurt than Europeans and a culture that has traditionally relied on pills, rather than food and natural remedies, to remain healthy.

Still, given Activia's popularity and the growing public demand for natural products in the United States, some experts say probiotics have the potential to be this decade's oat bran, which became a food sensation in the 1980s after it was shown to reduce cholesterol levels.

There is broad agreement that probiotics may help improve health and research linking them to relief of irritable-bowel syndrome, yeast infections and diarrhea that results from certain illnesses.